


Research

by odiums



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 12:10:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18120566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odiums/pseuds/odiums
Summary: Late night researching results in more than a failed fact check. Check your sources.





	Research

Hours faded with the gentle _tick, tock, tick, tock_ of the grandfather clock. Offbeat with each tick, Nera scrolled through the search results, and with each tock she clicked on an article. The clock chimed thrice; echoing into the cyber lit den Nera holed herself into when she could not sleep, which was most nights.

Too prideful to ask for help, Nera took to the Internet to find a cheap cure for her ailments. Each night she skimmed the same articles mindlessly, and without fail she rode herself to passing out from exhaustion.

Tonight, however, is different.

Nera jumped to page 13 and began her reading from there. A link caught her eye halfway down the page.

_Medical Research - Need Participants, Will Compensate_

 

She clicked it.

The web page was nothing fancy. The front page was the testimony of Nox Labs, the research facility, and Nera didn’t care about that. She clicked around until it lead her to a list of studies in need of volunteers. She found one that suited her perfectly.

_New Medication Made to React Quicker Under Stress_

_Nox Labs is developing a medication designed to react faster when symptoms arise. If the symptoms are currently in progress, relief should come immediately._

Nera perused the symptoms, mumbling to herself. “Depression, suicidal… Insomnia, anxiety…”

At the end of the list sat an information box asking what symptoms listed above the participant has, why an interest in this project, and basic information such as height, weight, age, and sex.

As Nera filled out the box, she was tempted to write “no, thank you” after sex, but the bang of the clock snapped her back into reality.

_4 in the morning,_ she thought. She typed out her email, and checked it over for any misspellings. She submitted her information.

Satisfied she found herself a cure, Nera shut down her computer, and shuffled to the couch to sleep.

A few days later, Nera received a reply from Nox Labs informing her she had been accepted as a volunteer. Included in the email are instruction on how to get to the laboratory, what time and day to meet, and what to wear. Nera eagerly awaited for that day to come.

***

Nera arrived at a squat building covered in windows, with no sign, and a small empty parking lot. Being the first appointment of the day, Nera didn’t think twice about it. She almost trotted to the building, a grin smeared across her cheeks.

The inside was unlit, uncomfortably warm, and smelled of something indescribably pleasant. Sunlight painted the room in sharp lines, and from what Nera can see, there is little to no furniture. There is a soft, yet grizzly, untraceable airy sound. She assumed it to be a decrepit air duct. _Wouldn’t surprise me, considering how old this place looks,_ she thought.

Believed to be in the wrong building, she went to leave. As her hand touched the door, she began to get a headache and feel woozy. Nera cradled her head, moaning. She was told not to eat anything before the first meeting. She slid to the floor clutching herself. Exhaustion washed over her, and although she knew she needed to get up, or at the very least dial for help, she cannot.

The grizzly air sound got louder- _huff, shuff, huff, shuff_ -and with it the scratch of a pen came to silence under the heavy footsteps emerging from the shadows. The figure crouched above Nera, a hazy lump in her faded vision. It took a few more notes before it lifted the collapsed Nera over his shoulder, and began the long walk back to Humbert Labs; not before discarding Nera’s bag behind him.

***

Hours passed before Nera came to. It took her several moments to open her eyes, and a few moments longer to stretch decently considering she woke up stiff in a lone chair.

The room was plain, containing only a few chairs, a security camera in a corner, and a door. She groggily leaned forward; the heel of her palms pressed into her eyes. She had half a mind to line the chairs up so she can lay down, and hopefully quell this nauseating pounding with a good nap, but there's a nagging, gnawing feeling in the back of her chest that wouldn’t let her rest despite her fatigue.

Nera stood up, and took another look around the room. She realized her bag and phone were not there, and her worry spiked.

Quietly, she cracked the door open. Turning her gaze this way and that, she is greeted by a corridor, getting darker and duller further in. A few doors lined the walls like soldiers standing at attention to welcome the set of double doors emphasized by a skylight at the end of the corridor.

Nera stepped out, leaving the door wide open behind her. It tapped the wall, which sent Nera jumping into the air. She flapped her hands at it with a grimace. Behind her, another security camera in the hallway silently turned to watch her shuffle down the hall.

She tested each door, and, in her knob jiggling, found that all of them, except the double doors at the end of the hall, were locked.

She passed through the double doors, and entered a dimly lit laboratory.

Stacks of metal cases lined the hall, softly gleaming in the light. In the center of the room was a thick glass circular office. Glass halls branch from the room like arms reaching further, and further into the darkened corners. Clutter, microscopes, and other equipment Nera can't fathom sat on and around a desk in the office. Every so often, small red dots pulsated randomly in the shadow. Nera followed the vague trail they left behind, and found herself growing uneasy under the craning camera above her.

_If I make it out of her alive, Nera vowed, I'm never using the Internet again._

Nera crept down the hall to her right. To her left was a holding cell, barren, with four large air holes on each side of the wall **;** and the sight to her right made Nera gasp horribly.

A body lay on the ground, gaunt and greenish. The skin is pulled taught over the bone in some places, and a puddle of faintly stinking orange and yellow vomit was dried beneath the body. Rows of black, deflated canisters lined the walls, connected to pipes leading to and through the ceiling.

In the next cell over, to her left, she sees a slouched over form, shrouded in black hair and twitching. More canisters, puffed up and shiny like an overstuffed trash bag lined the walls in that room.

Nera quickened her pace. Each footstep further agitated her headache. She passed more and more people in varying states of decaying death; only a few still living and looking decent despite their trembling.

Nera reeled back sharply when a man in a white lab coat threw himself against the glass, banging on the glass and shouting. She couldn't make out his words, muffled through the thick barrier and her rising adrenaline. But, his face bled the panic worse than his fists against the wall, and her eyes slipped with his feet as he scrambled to grasp a purchase that didn't exist.

Suddenly, yellow gas began drifting into the room. The man choked and sputtered, clutched and scratched at his throat and face. The gas settles into the room like a thick blanket, a cruel security that pressed him down to the floor and rested on his shoulders. Nera began to sob, unable to tear her eyes away from his dead wide eyes stare, until she heard a familiar _huff, shuff, huff, shuff_ and the scratch of a pen behind her.

Nera stumbled and twisted away from the breathing. She fell on her back, which rendered her helpless as pain shot to her skull. Through her tears, Nera saw a man.

A tall robust man wearing a gas mask, and dressed in a thick yellow apron and gloves hovered above her. His attention was on the clipboard in his hands and the dead man in the cell. He muttered ecstatically to himself. Nera gaped like a fish.

“I see the rabbit escaped the enclosure.” He spoke, and tucked the pen and clipboard under his arm as he turned to face her.

His voice scratched uncomfortably against her, thickened slightly by the mask, but not unintelligible.

“What… Who are you?” Nera stuttered.

“The head of Nox Labs.”

Nera's blood thinned as the weight of hopelessness, and her ignorance settled in her bones.

“Everything is prepared, and the test will be completed shortly.”

Before Nera can react, the man stooped low, brought his arm back and punched her in the face, knocking her out again.

***

Nera woke to a piercing pain in her skull. Her body slowly caught up to her brain; no surprise, she felt like she had been ran over. Her eyes are the last to feel functional. Her right eye opened successfully. Her left eye cracked open, forced shut by a swollen bruised cheek.

As soon as she tried to sit up, barely getting an inch off the ground, her head lolled to the side, and Nera is thankful she hadn’t eaten anything that morning. Dry heaving settled her back to the floor. She reached a hand up to her face to try and smother the light out, but flinches away when her hand accidentally brushed her nose.

_Broken,_ she thinks distantly.

When the heaving and roiling nausea subsided, Nera took stock of the room from her place on the floor.

There was an examination table in the center of the room, glittering sterile. Stacked inflated canisters lined either wall, connected to the ceiling with long metal pipes. Above her were three long fluorescent light bulbs. To her right, a metal door sat between two shelves lined with bottles and beakers. To her left, a large glass window reflects Nera’s battered face, accented by the dark laboratory.

The door hissed and thunked open, then thunked and hissed closed. A chill choked Nera as she saw the man from before enter the room in the reflection. Her eye widens, and she began to tremble. The man kept her under his gaze for a long time, and Nera flinched hard Caustic thought she might seize from terror. Nera still felt his stare stick to her when he turned to one of the shelves, and pulled down a bottle filled with a swirling yellow gas.

He seemed to be examining it as he held it aloft, tilted it back and forth.

His address made her flinch. “Let us see how long it takes for you to succumb to the effects of this...medicine.”

He stilled. For a few too long seconds, Nera felt she couldn’t breathe. The buzz from the light nearly deafened her.

Suddenly, the man turned and rushed toward her. Nera shrieked, and turned her head to see him coming, a block of cold thumped in her stomach. He stopped above her, on one knee, and uncorked the bottle with one thumb. Nera sucked in a breath; she tightly pressed her hands over her mouth, and under her nose despite the discomfort.

The man gripped Nera’s hair tightly in one hand, and shoves the bottle under her nose with the other. Nera sobbed in her fear, and quaked in his grasp as she tried to hold her coughs in against his assault.

“Just a taste is all you need.” he prodded, trying to wiggle the bottle between her fingers.

Without warning, the man retreated.

“I think that’s enough stimuli for now,” he said, and left the room.

Nera heaved air in. A steady, sharp hiss comes from her left, then her right, her left again, until each canister hissed in perfect harmony.

Nera scrambled to turn around on her hands and knees. She saw the man through the other side of the glass slowly twisting a valve. With each turn of his wrist, the hissing increased. She stared up at him, as she began to cough. Her hands immediately press into her eyes as they stung, and rubbed at them furiously. When she pulled them away, her fingers were covered in blood.

She crawled over to the table, trying to heft herself up, to get to the door and run, but her arms weakened and she slipped and smacked her head on the floor. She doubled over, clawing at her stomach as it flipped, and scratching her head as it pounded. She laid gasping on the floor, prone, and in a ball.

Caustic watched the girl struggle for air, watched the tears of blood leak from her eyes, and he knew the hot tight feeling in his gut when he saw her try to pick herself up was arousal.

Death always fascinated Caustic in the most morbid of ways. He's thought about taking a dead body, cold and unmoving, and it made him revolt. But the idea of taking a dying body, fucking someone through their last struggle for life; that drove him mad.

He clutched his thighs as he considered waiting until he was in bed to masturbate to the memory, but the stir of his cock quickly squashed that ludicrous idea.

He didn’t waste a second. Caustic burst into the room and lifted her shaking body on the table.

She saw him out of the corner of her eye, a blurry black thing creeping closer and closer to her face.

“Don’t rush to your end,” he breathed in that distorted, disgusting voice. “I linger on these final moments.”

Her vision was completely lost the second he rolled her on her back. She blinked rapidly in a futile attempt to regain her vision. Her arms and legs began to tingle sharply, and that feeling clawed through her torso as her body begins to weaken. Barely, she heard rustling and shuffling. She’s unaware of her bottom being lift and set back on the table, unaware of him slipping inside and rocking against her. But, her body still reacts. She clamped weakly on his cock, and it was enough to make Caustic groan.

The last ebb of her hearing caught his moan, and a final sob strangled itself in her throat as she slackened completely, dying with the realization she was being violated.

He finished shortly after she died. He cleaned himself, and hurried to take note of his discoveries. Caustic leaves the room as it is, not bothering to clean up. Not when there are other tests to conduct.


End file.
